Moving Day: A Thriller (31 page)

Yet what choice was there? None. None but survival. And that survival’s necessary and subsequent rending of his previous universe: a wolf child, creating his own authority, his own morality, his own existence . . .

Night falls flat over the 150 acres of scrub.

Peke finds himself alert again. Time must have passed. Peke in his suspended state, thoughtless, imageless, a trick of his childhood existence, a reexperience of time that he learned when lying in cold fields, staring at faraway stars.

The old Colonel is lying on the sofa, asleep. One of the skinheads, the small, skinny one, is somewhere out of sight, crashed on a bed, he presumes.

The other two, though, the muscled middle one and the big, beefy one with the swastika on his forehead—the two most aggressive ones—are eating something in the kitchen.

They haven’t offered Peke anything. He’s starting to go weaker from his hunger, he can sense. They’ve given him water grudgingly when he’s asked for it—small half cups—not wanting him to urinate, not wanting to again deal with his bodily needs, not wanting to see his cock again.

The novelty of the prisoner is wearing off. It is obvious they are waiting now only for permission. Only for the go-ahead.

The two are in the kitchen, laughing, guffawing meanly. The kitchen is close, but there is a wall. He can hear jars opening and closing, the refrigerator opening and closing, the clatter of plates and cutlery. It sounds more elaborate than a snack. That’s good. That’s a little more time. Rock and roll blares on the radio in the kitchen—a hostile, high-speed noise. Noise—that’s good, too.

He unwraps his clenched fingers from around the scissors slowly, aware that his fingers will initially be cramped and useless.

He almost drops the scissors anyway, his fingers are so unused to moving after being clenched for so long.

He exercises his fingers a little individually, limbers them, tries the scissors motion, prepares. Because once he starts, there is no going back. Anyone will see that the duct tape has been cut. The secret will be revealed.

Nail scissors. A little tool of civilization. We trim our nails in respect for one another, to greet one another civilly, to touch one another gently. A tool to keep us from growing the claws of animals. Nail scissors—a representation of civilization, and maybe his one chance to return to that civilization.

Can he even cut the tape at all, with these little nail scissors?

He works the sharp tips into the tape between his wrists carefully. This gives him a starting point. He begins to slice outward from there, working against the tape’s interior edges with the inside edge of the chrome blade. Holding the scissors in his right hand, he closes the blades, helping the little scissors by tilting them slightly as he goes, letting the scissors tear at the tape as well as cut it.

He feels the tear in the top layers of tape. He feels the top layers begin to give way, layer by layer.

It’s too slow.

His heart pumps. He tries to remain calm, but he must work fast.

The radio plays. Sends out a pulsing, tinny cacophony. The mean laughter, the brusque eruptions from the kitchen, continue. He is acutely aware of them, but at the same time not aware of them at all, as he works the tape with the scissors, small snip by small snip, layer by layer.

Suddenly, his hands are free. It’s a surprise to him. It feels odd, like a mistake.

The suddenness of it so alarms him, he drops the scissors.

But they fall directly beneath him, under the chair, and, hands now free, he quickly scoops them up and, not pausing, begins to use one blade to rip at the bands of duct tape around his waist.

It is no longer snipping. He is slashing fiercely with the little scissors, slashing at the many layers of wrapping across his waist and thighs, across the knees and shins. For some of it, where there are not as many layers, he needs only one neat, sharp cut, like a mad surgeon making a single seam, opening the patient up. But most of it takes more than that—slashing, jabbing, poking, ripping, tearing. If he were to pull the tape quickly, the loud, hollow rips and zips might be heard, even over the pulsing radio. And peeling off the many layers slowly, quietly, would take too long. He must work between these two extremes. He is still limited to the blades of the little scissors and his maniacal silent surgery.

His waist is done.

His thighs are done. He has reached his knees.

“I mean, fuck, I ain’t takin’ that shit; I don’t care who it is . . .” The voice rising above the manic jungle thump of the radio, perhaps even driven by it, then settling down again . . . The voices in the kitchen go more muffled once more.

It’s taking too long.

He’s running out of time.

Faster, faster
. He is not thinking anything.

And then, incredibly, his knees, his feet, are free.

He sits in the chair a moment, briefly uncomprehending, momentarily startled that this has worked . . .

The sudden physical freedom causes a sensation of floating, after hours, days, pinned to the chair . . .

And then, as he has imagined a hundred times before, as he has calculated and repeated incessantly to himself so that he would not forget when the time came, he takes the three long, quick steps to the back door, grabs what is left of the roll of duct tape that wrapped him, grabs what he knows from his previous visit is the key ring with the barn key, hanging there on the hook, steps out onto the rickety wooden back landing, closes the door quietly but firmly, and stumbles directly into the night.

“Hey, Lee, that you, you shithead?” Called out in a moment from the kitchen.

The big, beefy, tattooed skinhead comes around the corner when there’s no response.

The big skinhead looks at the broken tape, at the empty chair.

And grins.

The old Jew has escaped.

Now he can go ahead and kill him. Now it’ll be OK.

T
he packing is not as careful this time. As Rose expected. The possessions that have less value are rushed into the truck, loose. But it is still as thorough, she notices. It is still everything. As if to make a point. Not so the thief has it, but so the Pekes don’t. She hopes it’s a point the thief wants to make to her husband, not just to her, or only to himself.

Her heart still pounds tensely, slightly painful. It has pounded like this—she’s been aware of it—all day. It didn’t increase when Estelle Simon approached or relent when she finally wandered away. She watches through the kitchen window. The crew has loaded the last of the possessions and closed the gate of the truck, but they have not yet locked it.

From the kitchen window, she can just see the rear gate of the truck in the gathering twilight. She roughly calculates—they’ll drive all night. Arrive by morning.

She’ll have the embarrassment of reporting it again. Dealing once more with the police. Telling them that she had no choice, that her husband was held hostage. The insurance companies will not be so understanding this time. They could deny the claim completely, insisting that she should have called the police. But what
does any of that matter? It is all mere aftermath, when her husband is back beside her.

If her husband is back beside her.

The thief still stands next to her in the kitchen. His three men are now all in the doorway. Childishly, she counts them. Just to be sure. Ridiculous. She knows it’s the four of them together. She’s watched them all day, and here they are, all four.

“Counting us up?” asks the thief. “Worried there are more of us?”

She’s startled. He’s seen her counting—unconsciously nodding at each one. “You think there’s gonna be someone staying and hiding in the closet?” He smiles archly at her.

She pretends to ignore it. “You have what you came for,” she says. “Now it’s yours. When do you return what belongs to me?” Pointedly, defiantly, from a position of weakness, but as if from a position of strength.

Nick says quietly, “We’ll see.” As if to a demanding child.

A stab of pain goes through her. The fact that there is no completion. That she doesn’t yet know.

The truck pulls out. She has held up. Held it all in. Now she falls apart. Cracks completely. Crumples to the floor, her sobs pyramiding into wails, chaotic, patternless, echoing in the newly empty room.

She crawls to the telephone in the center of the empty room, the only object still in it, curls up next to it, to do all she can do.

Wait.

Wait for a call.

Just as the Colonel and the skinheads were waiting for a call.

But, of course, they are no longer waiting.

L
et’s take the dogs! They’ll smell him!” Excited voices on the back-porch landing, the harsh porch light sending sharp, slanted shadows stabbing into the night.

“Get him! Get him!” they command, their excitement uncontainable, and it is enough. The dogs understand. They hear the extremity of tone in the commanding voices, the fever pitch, and they understand from merely that. The dogs take off barking, paws splaying comically, cartoonish, as they seek traction in the dust. Twin black bullets of aggression. An animal translation of the bloodlust the skinheads feel.

Night. Running. Dogs. The beams of flashlight lanterns dancing in the leaves.

He has come full circle.

But he is not an agile, feral seven-year-old. He is more than sixty years older, much slower. In good shape, yes, in good health for a man in his seventies, only a little bit arthritic, after all. But he is no agile child.

Fortunately, he has cased it. He has been here before. Sitting in the chair with the scissors tucked into his palms, eyeing the prefab barn’s keys on the nail on the wall, he has been picturing it all. Remembering it from his aimless wandering of the grounds
as his own men loaded their truck. The barn—its bays empty of his belongings for the moment. He has been picturing, remembering it all.

He is no agile, feral child. But he has a plan.

The pond is glassy black in the cloudy, moonless night. A black, eerie liquid surface one comes upon suddenly. When he reaches it, he stares for a moment at its pellucid, frightening beauty. Then removes his shoes, as if in a rushed ceremony. He wades slowly, silently, into it. No splashing. No sound. He feels the cold, clammy water climb his body, envelop him in its chill, devour him in its darkness and mud. He thinks of the crystalline pool off the back deck in Santa Barbara where he does his morning laps, the water so clear you see through it beneath you to the immaculate bottom. It’s hard to believe they’re both called water. There should be different subsets of such a variable substance. It’s like the descriptive inefficiency of calling a twenty-two-year-old Montana skinhead and a seventy-two-year-old Jewish war survivor the same species. He feels oddly, momentarily calm, in the water.